Climate Common Sense is not a sceptical site but a non-believer's site .Global warming and cooling are natural phenomena and carbon dioxide is a lovely gas vital to plant growth. Global Warming has stopped and Climate Change ( I call it Weather) is the new manufactured bogeyman. This website will present a realist view on the Climate Change debate.

Sunday, March 31, 2013

The graph below in an article in the Mail Online has sparked an extraordinary reaction from the climate establishment in the UK.
The reaction itself is newsworthy and the Mail gleefully reports on it and takes the opportunity to reprint the offending document.

The official watchdog that advises the Government on greenhouse gas emissions targets has launched an astonishing attack on The Mail on Sunday – for accurately reporting that alarming predictions of global warming are wrong.

We disclosed that although highly influential computer models are still estimating huge rises in world temperatures, there has been no statistically significant increase for more than 16 years.

Despite our revelation earlier this month, backed up by a scientifically researched graph, the Committee on Climate Change still clings to flawed predictions.

The accuracy of computer forecasts is vital because they influence politicians and their key environmental advisers on how urgently to act on climate change – and how many billions of pounds they take from the taxpayer in ‘green’ levies. The Committee on Climate Change claims such forecasts must be right because world temperatures have previously matched computer models’ ‘outputs’ for most of the past 60 years. Yet as this newspaper pointed out, for almost all of that 60-year period the models were not making predictions – because they did not yet exist.

Instead, the models had recently been making ‘hindcasts’ – backward projections based on climate simulations and tailored to actual temperatures. The evidence shows the models collapse when they try to forecast the future.

Author Andrew Montford, who runs the widely read Bishop Hill climate blog, leapt to The Mail on Sunday’s defence and said Sir Brian’s reliance on ‘hindcasts’ was ‘crazy, crazy stuff’.

David Whitehouse, of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, said the graph showed models were so unreliable that ‘if this kind of data were from a drugs trial it would have been stopped long ago’.

And last week, The Economist repeated our claims that many scientists now believe that previous estimates of ‘climate sensitivity’ – how much the world will warm each time the level of carbon dioxide doubles – are far too high.

In a key 2007 report, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggested this was most likely to be about 3C, with 4.5C considered ‘likely’. However, recent research suggests the true figure is much lower – between 1.5C and 2C – giving the world many more decades to avoid disaster through effective new technologies.

The Committee on Climate Change, established by the 2008 Climate Change Act, advises the Government on setting ‘carbon budgets’ and CO2 emissions cuts. It is chaired by Lord Deben, who also heads Veolia Water UK, which connects windfarms to the National Grid.

Bjorn Lomborg has made the claim that 110 billion dollars spent in German subsidies on solar panels will delay global warming by only 37 hours. Billions of dollars of subsidies in Europe would not be necessary if "green power" was economically sound. Bjorn Lomborg believes in global warming but believes there are much smarter and cheaper ways of reducing CO2.

"The Germans are spending about $110 billion on subsidies for these solar panels," said Lomborg. "The net effect of all those investments will be to postpone global warming by 37 hours by the end of the century."

"All those billions, for 37 hours delay?," asked Stossel.

"Yeah," said Lomborg, "so remember them in [the year] 2100 and say, 'Wow.'"

Stossel clarified, "You believe in global warming and man-made--"

"Global warming is real," said Lomborg, "and it is we need to fix. But we should fix it smartly, and not in a very, very costly way as we're doing it now. Germany is probably spending $660 for every ton of CO2 they're cutting."

Friday, March 29, 2013

After the fifth severe winter in the UK and 250,000 deaths from the icy weather questions are being rightly asked about the direction the country is heading. Fuel taxes and subsidies to useless green energy schemes are pricing electricity beyond the means of many poor and elderly. As things stand, dying of the cold remains a horribly British disease.From the Telegraph

A few months ago, a group of students in Oslo produced a brilliant spoof video that lampooned the charity pop song genre. It showed a group of young Africans coming together to raise money for those of us freezing in the north. “A lot of people aren’t aware of what’s going on there right now,” says the African equivalent of Bob Geldof. “People don’t ignore starving people, so why should we ignore cold people? Frostbite kills too. Africa: we need to make a difference.” The song – Africa for Norway – has been watched online two million times, making it one of Europe’s most popular political videos.

The aim was to send up the patronising, cliched way in which the West views Africa. Norway can afford to make the joke because there, people don’t tend to die of the cold. In Britain, we still do. Each year, an official estimate is made of the “excess winter mortality” – that is, the number of people dying of cold-related illnesses. Last winter was relatively mild, and still 24,000 perished. The indications are that this winter, which has dragged on so long and with such brutality, will claim 30,000 lives, making it one of the biggest killers in the country. And still, no one seems upset.

Somewhere between the release of the 1984 Band Aid single and Al Gore’s 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, political attention shifted away from such problems. The idea of people (especially old people) dying in their homes from conditions with which we are all familiar now seems relatively boring. Much political attention is still focused on global warming, and while schemes to help Britain prepare for the cold are being cut, the overseas aid budget is being vastly expanded. Saving elderly British lives has somehow become the least fashionable cause in politics.

The reaction to the 2003 heatwave was extraordinary. It was blamed for 2,000 deaths, and taken as a warning that Britain was horribly unprepared for the coming era of snowless winters and barbecue summers. The government’s chief scientific officer, Sir David King, later declared that climate change was “more serious even than the threat of terrorism” in terms of the number of lives that could be lost. Such language is never used about the cold, which kills at least 10 times as many people every winter. Before long, every political party had signed up to the green agenda.

Since Sir David’s exhortations, some 250,000 Brits have died from the cold, and 10,000 from the heat. It is horribly clear that we have been focusing on the wrong enemy. Instead of making sure energy was affordable, ministers have been trying to make it more expensive, with carbon price floors and emissions trading schemes. Fuel prices have doubled over seven years, forcing millions to choose between heat and food – and government has found itself a major part of the problem.

Australia, one of the wealthiest nations in the world in natural resources has been so comprehensively mismanaged over term of the Labor government that despite increasing revenues we have been borrowing a billion dollars a week from our grandchildren. Swan has claimed a "huge hit" to the government income is the problem. Looking at government receipts would indicate Wayne is telling porkies.Catallaxy examines the truth of the Treasurer's claim..

Over the past 5 Budgets and the recent mid-year review we’ve put in place more than $150 billion in saves, many targeted at addressing the structural challenges in the budget.

So what is the net effect of all that? The underlying cash balance – showing the expected $20 billion deficit for this year instead of the $1 billion surplus reported in the MYEFO. (The data in the two graphs above show the original, now discredited, data from the last MYEFO).

Thursday, March 28, 2013

Tim Flannery ,Australia's Climate Commissioner and failed climate prophet has dismissed claims by a nurse treating the complaint of wind farm sickness. Flannery lives on the waterfront after warning people about the impending disaster from rising tides. He is also predicted that our dams would never fill again prior to years of flooding rains .

CLIMATE commissioner Tim Flannery has dismissed concerns about possible health effects from wind farm noise, saying illness may be caused by stress or residents being "sick with envy" at not getting payment for turbines on their properties.

Speaking at a nurses' forum yesterday about the relationship between climate change and health, Professor Flannery fended off a question from a regional Victorian nurse who said she supported wind energy but was seeing many patients with health problems attributed to a nearby wind farm.

"What I've read and experienced is that there are no proven health impacts directly from wind-related noise," Professor Flannery said. "What we do see is people who are adversely affected by it through perhaps stress or tension or worry."

Professor Flannery said he had asked a Canberra man who had leased part of his land for six turbines whether he had seen any health effects from the wind farm.

"He said, 'Yeah mate, people get sick, sick with envy," Professor Flannery said. "He said $60,000 a year (was) coming straight into his farm and people next door can see the turbines every day.

"I'm not saying that's the whole story, by any means, but I think from what I've read the health impacts are more (at) that social level rather than anything caused directly by the noise."

The nurse who asked the question described herself as an environmental activist who had supported plans to build the Hepburn wind farm, a community-owned two-turbine project near Daylesford, northwest of Melbourne.

"As a nurse I experience lots of people around that wind farm having very negative health impacts from it," she said. "In the enthusiasm for bringing in alternative technology, how can we ensure those affected get social justice? Whilst I support wind, I have to say that I don't support the Hepburn wind farm because they failed to address the health issues of those affected by it."

The Coalition has pledged to hold an inquiry into wind farm noise if elected in September, after a Senate committee last year discounted health claims but did not dispute that some people living near turbines felt unwell.

A University of Sydney study released this month concluded wind farm-associated health problems were "communicated" diseases of a psychogenic origin, based on non-physical causes such as fear and anxiety.

The study drew its data on the number of people complaining about health problems from wind farm developers, submissions to government public inquiries and news media articles.

Monday, March 25, 2013

The Conversation is a majority taxpayer-funded left-wing blog allowing academics, most of whom have no real-world experience, to address a mostly left-wing compliant audience.
To gauge the political color of the readers you only need to look at the reaction to articles by Michelle Grattan , a left-of-centre journalist who recently left the Age to take up an editorial position at the Conversation. Not realising her audience is mainly to the left of Lenin her fairly mainstream articles have provoked near hysteria among the pseudo intelligentsia .That is why when I commented on today's article "States of decay: complementing the federal carbon policy" it was not surprising that my comment was deleted.

In a survey last year of 22,812 people across 22 countries (including Australia), the polling organisation GlobeScan found that environmental concerns had fallen worldwide since 2009, and fewer than one in two people (49%) now viewed climate change as a “very serious” problem. GlobeScan’s chairman, Doug Miller, commented: “Scientists report that evidence of environmental damage is stronger than ever – but our data shows that economic crisis and a lack of political leadership mean that the public are starting to tune out.”

Miller’s comments could have been tailor-made for Australia. The famous “hockey stick graph” of rising temperatures has been confirmed, and atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations spiked dangerously upward in 2012. The Australian Climate Change Commission found that climate change is already adversely affecting Australians with record-breaking heat, severe bushfires, extreme rainfall, and damaging floods – byproducts of the “Angry Summer”.

Yet with the centrepiece of Australia’s climate policy not even a year old, most Australians are sick of it, or sick of hearing about it – fewer than 13% trust what politicians say about major public issues like climate change.

My first comment was with reference to the freezing spring in Europe and the USA following predictions of snow"being a thing of the past and the years of flooding in Australia following predictions of continuing drought and noting that people are not stupid and can see for themselves what is happening. This was the reason they did not believe politicians.
That note disappeared along with comments from other skeptics.

"Your comment on the article "States of decay: complementing
the federal carbon policy" has been removed in line with our community
standards."

I await the verdict on a follow-up to my reply below.

"The first part of this article is about a survey on peoples attitude about climate change and the fact that the number of those concerned was decreasing. "fewer than 13% trust what politicians say about major public issues like climate change"
My comment on why this is occurring has been deleted as off topic. Maybe the Conversation needs to put in italics the parts of articles we are allowed to comment on. "
The good news for the UK is that they are apparently going to have their own version of the Conversation.

Saturday, March 23, 2013

Mother Nature Nonsense has added another page to the Global-Warming-causes-everything tome with the addition of the image of rampaging feral goat herds terrifying the populace.

Global warming is already causing serious problems all around the planet, from stronger storms and longer droughts to rising seas and expanding diseases. But at the same time, it's also spurring lots of less serious, even innocuous phenomena — trumpeter swans arethriving in Alaska, for example, while Rocky Mountain marmots arefeeling friskier.

And according to a new study published in the ecology journal Oikos, feral goats may also flourish on this thin, ephemeral silver lining of climate change. Whether that would be good news for anyone but goats, however, remains to be seen.

Of course if the Alaskan trumpeter swans have been revelling in the warmer weather their party may be short-lived given the current temperature trends which are distinctly negative as the temperature cycles downward.

Bitter cold records being set this winter in Alaska will not help these beautiful birds either and maybe a common sense solution needs to be found which does not rely on the chimera of global warming.

Friday, March 22, 2013

Following the huge media coverage of last year's summer ice minimum the warmists have been strangely silent as global sea ice is now above average and the rapid arctic ice area recovery has reached a level high compared to most recent years.

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Kevin Rudd comes up short on numbers and in the end did not contest the leadership spill. Gillard and Swan were not challenged and remain in their positions. However the Labor party is in a precarious position and highly divided while Kevin Rudd destabilises from the wings.

Julia Gillard has called a leadership vote and on her current polling in the electorate this is akin to a turkey calling an early Thanksgiving. She has called an early vote in the faint hope that she could win but the money is currently on a return of Kevin Rudd. Watch this space.
Whoops! Kevin Rudd backs off and a wounded Julia continues as PM. Rudd will gather support and if the polls continue badly for Gillard he will strike when he has the numbers.

Australia can look at Europe to visualise our future. The broken European model of excessive welfare, government regulation and enormous debt is where we are headed after 6 years of ALP government. Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel has remarked that Europe has 7 per cent of the world's population, 25 per cent of global gross domestic product and 50 per cent of the world's welfare payments, a situation which is completely unsustainable and fueled by debt.Greg Sheridan of the Australian has more in a fine analysis which I include in full.

SIX years of Labor government, by this year's election in September, will result in a new Australia. We have contracted the European disease. Labor has taken us towards the most spectacularly unsuccessful model of government in the developed world today. We will have almost all the European pathologies but none of the European security of a big local market and a benign security environment.

Europe's present distress is our future. Everyone knows that part of Europe's problem is excessive welfare. As Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel has remarked, Europe has 7 per cent of the world's population, 25 per cent of global gross domestic product and 50 per cent of the world's welfare payments.

Julia Gillard is taking us far down that road. The disability insurance and Gonski reforms combined will require more than $20 billion a year from Canberra.

But European dysfunction also involves a kind of corporate-state approach to government and culture best exemplified in Benito Mussolini's Italy. Before he was a fascist, Mussolini was a socialist. The corporate state envisaged government leadership of the economy and culture. In Europe, many of the biggest firms are state-owned or government linked, public broadcasters are powerful and universities are mainly state institutions.

Labor's astonishing attack on the free media, through its attempt to arm government with a sanction over what newspapers can publish, is European in spirit, though worse even than most European jurisdictions.

The corporate-state approach to ideology and culture has been a terrible failure in Europe.

We are copying that failure. Here, the ABC gets $1bn a year from government. It has a strong left-of-centre bias. That means it tends to favour more government regulation, especially of its competitors, and a narrow view of what is acceptable content in the media.

It was striking to see in the parliamentary committee this week Labor and Green politicians referring to particular columns or editorials they disagreed with. The context was meant to be an inquiry about the structural regulation of the media. Citing perfectly mainstream columns they simply didn't like suggested media regulation would be influenced by these dislikes. Manifestly, this is a terrible way to arrive at government regulation. It is a naked example of politics intimidating a free and independent institution.

In Australia, most culture-forming activity is ultimately funded by the state. As well as the ABC there are the government-funded universities and the countless journals, blogs, publishing houses and the like that the ABC and the universities run. The commercial media are perhaps the only really independent, big culture-forming institutions wholly beyond the endless, hydraulic ideological pressure that comes from government funding.

This is very similar to much of Europe. The US is different, with its rich tradition of commercial broadcasters, private universities and independent think tanks.

Social ideological orthodoxy has been prominent in Europe, and a terrible failure. It has led to revolts by alienated parts of the electorate, who often choose irresponsible vehicles for electoral protest, in part because they have been excluded from mainstream political discussion.

European political culture has typically seen the triumph of an urban, professional, symbol-wielding class, employed mostly by governments and government-funded bodies. Part of their ideological outlook is a contempt for traditional Christianity. Their trenchant inner-city values involve a desire to mock Christianity. We see the local version of this on ABC TV when Shaun Micallef is broadcast exclaiming: "Jesus H. Christ on a bike", or in the sitcom based on life at the Lodge in which a staff member bears the name Jesus, to facilitate lame jokes confusing profanity with the name of the founder of the Christian religion.

Ironically, if newspapers did this, under the government's regulatory proposals they would probably be censured, but in the ideological world view of the ABC this is cutting-edge satire and moral courage.

In countless specific policy areas, Labor has taken Australia down the failed European road, often outdoing even the Europeans, as with our uniquely costly carbon tax. Similarly, defence spending is savagely reduced, replicating European insouciance about national security without the benign strategic environment Europe enjoys. Since Labor changed policy, about 35,000 boatpeople have arrived in Australia. Most of them will stay permanently and bring two or three relatives under family reunion. The majority are unskilled Muslim immigrants never chosen by Australian policy. The vast majority of Muslims are law-abiding, good citizens but the minority who experience difficulties is substantial. The key difference between Australia and Europe is that we have emphasised skilled migrants while Europe's experience has been unskilled immigration, much of it asylum-seeker, and generous family reunion. As a result, immigration is a disaster in Europe.

Labor's economic management has been poor. It inherited a $20bn surplus and has delivered consistent deficits. Gross government debt is $270bn and rising. The economy looks good only because of John Howard's inheritance and because the minerals boom has made every resources-based economy temporarily look good. But Australia is making no preparation for lean years ahead.

The labour market is being reregulated at a frenetic pace, replicating one of the central failings of European economies.

In foreign policy we have moved towards the European consensus and away from the Australian tradition on issues such as Israel and become more affected by the UN mindset than our distinctive circumstances.

Above all, government has become a thing of electoral symbolism, short-term fixes, bribes to sectional interests. The fiscal rigour and micro-economic reform of the Hawke-Keating Labor Party is utterly gone.

The centre-left vote in Australia is permanently fractured and this contributes to Labor's inability to make decisions encompassing the whole national interest.

No Labor government in memory has been so dependent on a dwindling trade union base, which it is using coercive government power to resuscitate. Europe's staggering failure is our new model.

Sunday, March 10, 2013

With all the climate nitwits running around demonising CO2 we can lose sight of what some real scientists are doing to benefit the globe. When we see that the major part of the globe is desert and it is increasing year by year any project that can reverse this trend deserves support. The trillions of dollars going down the gurgler on the global warming scam could be diverted to land reclamation with stunning results. Young potential scientists who want to save the world would be well advised to watch this. Interestingly, it turns on it's head the warmist theory that meat animals are damaging the climate when with different management they can be of huge benefit.

Saturday, March 9, 2013

There is little doubt that a new Coalition government in September will be disinclined to commit more than a token amount towards the climate scam and given the requirements for budget cutting the Climate Change bureaucracy should be quaking in their boots. Campbell Newman in Queensland has given a foretaste of the future by ruthlessly closing down the Queensland Office of Climate Change.
The Financial Review estimates that 20 billion dollars of cuts are likely with a new federal government.

The Coalition plans $20 billion in budget savings from cuts to the climate change bureaucracy and industry carbon assistance under a plan that would try to deliver big cuts in greenhouse gases at a minimal cost to business.

Outlining for the first time details of the opposition’s climate change policy, environment spokesman Greg Hunt said the Coalition would keep the Clean Energy Regulator, which Liberal leader Tony Abbott once dubbed the “carbon cop”.

The decision to retain the regulator, which now reports to Climate Change Minister Greg Combet and administers the carbon price, may help the Coalition deflect Labor claims that its direct action plan will not do much to reduce carbon emissions.

The Carbon Farming Initiative, which allows farmers to earn carbon credits by planting trees and reducing land clearing, would be expanded to enable new forms of abatement to be verified by theClean Energy Regulator.

The $20 billion in savings over four years would come from merging the departments of Environment and Climate Change, abolishing carbon assistance to companies, and closing down three climate change agencies: the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, which funds “green” technology; the Climate Change Authority, an independent government adviser; and the Climate Commission, which promotes the science of climate change.

The really sad thing is so many young people have gone to university in good faith to study climate change and related fields and who will have no useful qualification in life as the scam unfolds.

This week's scheduled House of Reps hearing on global warming was cancelled due to a large snowstorm but the irony of this would be lost on the true believers . As it turned out the storm arrived as foretold but the worst actually missed Washington .The earlier start to spring promised by the global warmers does not include events like this but we are used to them getting things wrong as when they predicted that "Children just aren't going to know what snow is" in the year 2000.

The snowquester has claimed yet another casualty: Wednesday's House hearing on global warming.

The House Science, Space and Technology Committee announced early Wednesday that it's postponing its environmental subcommittee's scheduled 10 a.m. hearing on the state of the science behind climate change. As a reason, it cited "weather."

The panel hasn't announced when the hearing will take place.

The session was apparently designed to shore up the knowledge of subcommittee members ahead of expected new carbon regulations from President Barack Obama. As of Tuesday evening, a committee spokesman had insisted the show would go on.

From the start, the idea of holding a climate hearing during a paralyzing D.C. snowstorm seemed ripe for snarky comments.

Cold weather,snow or ice interrruptions to global warming events happen so often they have been called the "Gore Effect" as he has been the recipient of Mother Nature's icy breath more than most.

the global warmers with his dismal view of life but in life things are never quite so bad as the doomsayers think.

Munich Re, the global insurance company with a Hanrahan outlook and which has been blatantly pushing the warmist line has been contradicted by real data showing that normalised weather disaster losses have been reducing over the last 20 years. Of course Munich Re has a vested interest in promoting a disaster ridden world using any means to increase premiums and has a natural fit with the global warming lobby.

This peer-reviewed data contradicts the propaganda of the Global Warming catastrophists who have switched from global warming which is no longer happening to weather extremes as the principal scare tactic.E. Neumayer and F. Barthel. 2011. Normalizing Economic Loss from Natural Disasters: A Global Analysis, Global Environmental Change, 21:13-24 (here in PDF).

They conclude: "there is no evidence so far that climate change has increased the normalized economic loss from natural disasters."NoTricksZone reports that deaths from natural catastrophes dropped 90% in 2012 , a statistic you will probably only read about on skeptics blogs.According to TAZ, 2012′s “total damages of $160 billion was below the long-term average. And foremost ‘only’ 9500 people died in 2012 from storms, floods and earthquakes - far less than the 106,000 in an average year.” That’s a huge drop of 90%! So all the dramatic stories about deadly weather extremes we’ve been hearing for months was mostly hype.

Co2 vs Global Temperature (from C3)

About Me

Retired Professional Electronics Engineer with specialist experience in design of power systems control ,revenue metering and electronics manufacturing. Throughout career held positions of university lecturer,professional design engineer,CEO and nurseryman.I am a keen bridge player and have special interests in the climate change fiasco, and the green energy disaster in progress.